Climate Change, Malthusian Catastrophe, and a Global Rule of Law

The paper will not directly engage the scientific question of global warming. Instead, it will discuss the present-day idea of global warming as successor to the nineteenth-century idea of the Malthusian Population Catastrophe. Viewed that way, the question becomes whether the human race, by cultivation and learning, has the capacity for ethical progress, or whether human nature is so inherently malevolent that, if left unregulated, it will inevitably bring destruction. A book by Nicolas de Condorcet, published in 1795, Progress of the Human Mind, was the single most influential summation of ideas from the Age of Reason and its Optimistic view of human capacity. In 1798 Thomas Malthus offered in rebuttal with a pessimistic appraisal of human possibility, in his Essay on Population. Malthus asserted that human history would eventually end – not in a world utopia – but in starvation and death. The only way to prevent such a fate was to impose a strict legal regime. This paper concludes: whatever the facts about global warming, there are fundamentally two types of solution: those enforced from the top down by coercive authority and those from the bottom up by public cultivation and learning. The Anglophone solution is to impose upon humankind an elevated global Rule of Law.